The
philosophy of literature

Strictly speaking, the philosophy of literature is a branch of
aesthetics, the branch
of philosophy that deals with the question, "what is art"? Much of aesthetic philosophy has
traditionally focused on the plastic arts or music, however, at the expense of the verbal
arts. In fact, much traditional discussion of aesthetic philosophy
seeks to establish criteria of artistic quality that are
indifferent to the subject matter being depicted. Since all
literary works, almost by definition, contain notional content,
aesthetic theories that rely on purely formal qualities tend to
overlook literature.

The very existence of narrative raises philosophical issues. In
narrative, a creator can embody, and readers be led to imagine, fictional characters, and even
fantastic creatures or
technologies. The ability of the human mind to imagine, and even to
experience empathy with,
these fictional characters is itself revealing about the nature of
the human mind. Some fiction can be thought of as a sort of a thought
experiment in ethics: they
describe fictional characters, their motives, their actions, and the consequences
of their actions. It is in this light that some philosophers have
chosen various narrative forms to teach their philosophy (see
below).

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Literature and language

Plato, for instance, believed
that literary culture and even the lyrics of popular music had a strong impact on the
ethical outlook of its consumers. In The Republic, Plato displays a strong
hostility to the contents of the literary culture of his period,
and proposes a strong censorship of popular literature in his utopia.

More recently, however, philosophers of various stripes have
taken different and less hostile approaches to literature. Since
the work of the British
Empiricists and Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth
century, Western philosophy has been preoccupied with a fundamental
question of epistemology: the question of the
relationship between ideas in the
human mind and the world existing outside the mind, if in fact such
a world exists. In more recent years, these epistemological issues
have turned instead to an extended discussion of words and meaning: can language in fact bridge the barrier between
minds? This cluster of issues concerning the meaning of language
and of "writings" sometimes
goes by the name of the linguistic turn.

As such, techniques and tools developed for literary
criticism and literary theory rose to greater
prominence in Western philosophy of the late twentieth century.
Philosophers of various stripes paid more attention to literature
than their predecessors did. Some sought to examine the question of
whether it was in fact truly possible to communicate using words,
whether it was possible for an author's intended meaning to be
communicated to a reader. Others sought to use literary works as
examples of contemporary culture, and sought to reveal unconscious
attitudes they felt present in these works for the purpose of
social criticism.

The truth
of fiction

Literary works also pose issues concerning truth and the philosophy of language. In
educated opinion, at least, it is commonly reputed as true that
Sherlock
Holmes lived in London. It is also considered true that
Samuel Pepys
lived in London. Yet Sherlock Holmes never lived anywhere at
all; he is a fictional character. Samuel Pepys, contrarily, is
judged to have been a real person. Contemporary interest in Holmes
and in Pepys share strong similarities; the only reason why anyone
knows either of their names is because of an abiding interest in
reading about their alleged deeds and words. These two statements
would appear to belong to two different orders of truth. Further
problems arise concerning the truth value of statements about fictional
worlds and characters that can be implied but are nowhere
explicitly stated by the sources for our knowledge about them, such
as Sherlock Holmes had only one head or Sherlock
Holmes never travelled to the moon.

Philosophical fiction

Some philosophers have undertaken to write philosophy in the
form of fiction, including
novels and short stories. This appears early on in the literature
of philosophy, where philosophers such as Plato wrote dialogues in which fictional or fictionalized
characters discuss philosophical subjects; Socrates frequently appears as a protagonist
in Plato's dialogues, and the dialogues are one of the prime
sources of knowledge about Socrates' teaching, though at this
remove it is sometimes hard to distinguish Socrates' actual
positions from Plato's own. Numerous early Christian writers,
including Augustine, Boethius, and Peter Abelard
produced dialogues; several early modern philosophers, such as George Berkeley
and David Hume, wrote
occasionally in this genre.

A number of philosophers have had important influence on
literature. Arthur Schopenhauer, largely as a
result of his system of
aesthetics, is perhaps the most influential recent philosopher
in the history of literature; Thomas Hardy's later novels frequently
allude to Schopenhauerian themes, particularly in Jude the
Obscure. Schopenhauer also had an important influence on
Joseph Conrad.
Schopenhauer also had a less specific but more widely diffused
influence on the Symbolist movement in European
literature. Lionel
Johnson also refers to Schopenhauer's aesthetics in his essay
The Cultured Faun.

Other works of fiction considered to have philosophical content
include:

Philosophical writing as
literature

A number of philosophers are still read for the literary merits
of their works apart from their philosophical content. The
philosophy in the Meditations of the Roman emperorMarcus Aurelius is unoriginal Stoicism, but the
Meditations are still read for their literary merit and
for the insight they give into the workings of the emperor's
mind.

Philosophy in literature

Philosophers in
literature

Socrates appears in a highly fictionalized guise, as a comic
figure and the object of mockery, in The Clouds by Aristophanes. In the play, Socrates
appears hanging from a basket, where he delivers oracles such
as:

I’d never come up with a single thing
about celestial phenomena,
if I did not suspend my mind up high,
to mix my subtle thoughts with what’s like them—
the air. If I turned my mind to lofty things,
but stayed there on the ground, I’d never make
the least discovery. For the earth, you see,
draws moist thoughts down by force into itself—
the same process takes place with water cress.

Also, Philip K.
Dick, who has often been compared to Borges, raises a
significant number of philosophical issues in his novels,
everything from the problem of solipsism to many questions of perception and reality.

Fictional philosophers occasionally occur throughout the works
of Robert
A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange
Land contains long passages that could be considered as
successors to the fictionalized philosophical dialogues of the
ancient world, set within the plot.